


déjà rêvé (variations on a theme)

by bonjourd



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), F/M, Feelings, Halloween, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Time Skips, masks but the real kind, what if-isms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 09:17:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20851061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonjourd/pseuds/bonjourd
Summary: “Yeah, I’ll have these dreams, some nights.”He taps his leg, licks his lips, and he’s never said this, never in fifteen years, but he doesn’t know when the next opening will come.“Where I fall off that train in the Alps, right? Or we’re in the Valkyrie and it crashes before we jump. Or we freeze to death out there, in the middle of nowhere. And it seems real.”





	déjà rêvé (variations on a theme)

prompts: mask, pumpkin carving

_Somewhere there must be storehouses_  
_where all these lives are laid away_  
_like suits of armor or old carriages_  
_or clothes hanging limply on the walls._

_Maybe all paths lead there,_  
_to the repository of unlived things._

— Rainer Maria Rilke

***

_1._

He sets the knives out carefully, one by one, largest to smallest. They are cleaned and aligned neatly on the countertop, reflecting the kitchen lights. The apartment is quiet. A pot and a plate dry by the sink. He smoothes over the newspaper and considers the gourd. It’s of modest size, a robust orange, nearly spherical. He clears his throat and squints. The lines of the sharpie marker create two evenly-spaced triangular eye sockets and one gap-toothed grin. Simple enough. He slides a mixing bowl closer. There’s a post-it note recipe for spiced and toasted pumpkin seeds in cramped script.

He selects the largest knife first, in his left hand for maximum control. The stroke meets the flesh with a barely-there resistance and then easy give that’s so familiar — too familiar — and he’s stabbing down, down, down—

The motion only lasts a split second and it sends a hook straight to the bottom of his gut, where it catches and spurs a wave of sour bile. He leaves the knife embedded in the flesh and rushes to the bathroom toilet, tile digging into his knees as he hurls up dinner and water and then nothing but a wretched croaking heaving. He flushes the bowl, shivers, closes his eyes and rests his forehead on the lip of the toilet. It’s probably disgusting, and he’s grateful his hair is tied. He’s not sure if it’s over yet. Better stay put.

The lock turns in the front door. A low rumble of a voice, half a phone conversation. It ends abruptly. Footsteps in the kitchen, a cabinet door, the faucet running. In the hallway, the air shifts to accommodate and it smells like autumn leaves, rain, wet paper. 

Bucky takes the glass of water Steve’s offering and waves him off, like he always does. He takes a sip and listens to the footsteps tread to their bedroom, around where Bucky’s piled his tactical gear for laundry, and there’s the clink of a belt buckle, the rustle of a jacket, changing office clothes. Bucky wipes his mouth and climbs to his feet, curses his knees as they wobble beneath him. The bathroom light is too bright. He’s a wrung-out dishcloth. 

He returns to the offending gourd. Car keys and a beaten leather wallet join it on the countertop. The knife sticks by the pumpkin’s stem. A wave of dread, then a furious shame. He’ll damn well carve a pumpkin in his own home if it takes him all night and ten trips to the toilet and acid reflux for three days and god forbid tears. This is his one festive task and he’s going to see it through. 

He wrenches out the knife and it’s coated in slick strings of blood— Pulp. He steels himself, takes a ragged breath, and stabs again. His emptied stomach contracts and his right hand skitters along the newspaper edge. Up, down. Again. Up, down. The sweat pours off him and his vision tunnels. One more, one more. He sets the knife aside with a steadiness only possible in his left hand. Grabs the gourd stem firm and yanks. It comes away with a wet ripping squelch and the overpowering scent of blood, a hot coppery spray, guts and gore—

He returns to himself eventually, whether it’s been ten seconds or ten minutes he doesn’t know. Steve is warm and steady pressed behind him, hands on either side of his neck like he’s holding him in place. There’s the clean scent of their laundry detergent. The pumpkin top is in the mixing bowl, a trail of seeds and pulp strewn across the newspaper. In a minute he’s going to reach inside and pull out the remaining seeds. 

In a minute. 

His throat is raw, his face damp. He imagines the dark closet or under the bed, where he keeps his best weapons, where he’s safe and protected instead of ugly and exposed and vulnerable below the kitchen lights. 

This goddamn pumpkin. 

He doesn’t flee. He focuses on Steve’s hands, their gentle press, the hard ridge on the second finger on the left. Even now, Steve is so strong. It’s tempting to pretend, and rewind him back a lifetime to youthfulness. There’s a pang of bitter jealousy; better than panic. 

“Take a break,” Steve says in his professor voice, his retired-but-not-really Captain voice. It’s old and weathered, like his wallet. 

“It’s so fucking stupid.” 

“It’s not.”

“It is.”

“Buck.”

“Just let me fucking finish it.”

The hands tighten on his shoulders and he thinks maybe he’s cursed to argue with every iteration of Steven Grant Rogers, small or large, young or old, until one of them finally kicks the bucket. 

He licks his lips. “I can do it.”

“I know.” The grip relaxes and settles lower.

Bucky squares his jaw, peers at the pumpkin. When he inhales it’s a breath full of soggy earth and a tinge of sweetness. 

“They say if you light a jack o’ lantern, it scares away bad spirits.”

“Strange selling you his spiel now?”

Steve shrugs, and Bucky sinks his flesh hand into the pulpy gourd. It remains that, nothing more. Steve’s breath puffs warm at his neck where he sets his mouth, lips curled in a smile. The mixing bowl fills with orange mess. He carves slowly, gently with the smaller knives, careful not to stab. Absent the violence of earlier, it becomes a process of creation, not mutilation. The pumpkin laughs and Bucky wipes its residue on his sweated shirt front. 

“Let’s hope it works,” he mutters.

***

_2._

He blinks when the light turns on.

Steve is in the doorway, wearing his old beaten suspenders twice-mended and a fond expression, _you unbelievable idiot_. Bucky doesn’t breathe. 

The light’s on and he realizes he’s in his office, three limbs akimbo in his chair and files cascading onto the carpet. Peggy is in the doorway. For a blissful moment he draws a complete blank.

“Oh for God’s sakes, Barnes.” There’s an exasperated sigh, and then Peggy is coming closer, setting down her martini glass and kneeling by his desk in her go-go boots. He notices streaks of gray in her hair, pulled by the costume headband, and wonders when that happened. Bucky’s pushing fifty and the mirror insists he’s not a day past thirty.

He goes to rub his scratchy eyes and a white sheet lifts with his hand. He pulls off the costume clumsily. It drapes over the chair, the cheery BOO! deflated. The wall clock says one in the morning. He can still hear The Beach Boys and bursts of laughter further in the building. 

“I’ll drive you home.”

“Don’t,” he mutters, and finally focuses on his desk. An empty bottle of Old Crow, the stubs of two joints. A spray of multicolored pills; a mix of Miltowns and remains from the medicine cabinet. Despite this, he unfortunately has no worse than a groggy headache. The dreams always slip away in the end. He gathers the pills one by one, and Peggy rests her chin on the desk’s edge. 

“I need to know I can still trust you with this position,” she says, as gently as she can.

His gaze snaps up. “I ain’t had a single failed mission in this department.”

“Don’t tempt fate, Captain.”

He scowls at the title and drops the Old Crow into his waste bin with a clang. “You asked me to join SHIELD, here I am. You wanna fire me, go ahead.”

“I think you want me to. You’re doing it again, pushing us away.” She glances pointedly at the framed photograph of the Howlies. “We all miss him. Steve—”

“You were supposed to keep him safe when I couldn’t,” he lashes out. The accusation falls muted among filing cabinets and bookcases, _The Art of War_ and _The Profession of Arms_.

“He made his own choices. I lost him too.”

“You should’ve left me there.” 

He knows he’s being churlish. It’s their old script, a rutted back-and-forth that lost its sting years ago. Six years tortured under Hydra and another two in the VA psych ward, where she got him out before he lost his name a second time. He’d lost other things instead: his arm, Steve, then his ma and Becca. His sanity, briefly.

“James.”

Caught in a tide of righteous self-pity, he slams the picture frame to the desk and retrieves it hastily but too late. There’s a crack straight through, ruined. Steve smiles stoically up at him. _Fuck you too, pal._ When he was well enough to travel, he spent his back pay on a recovery expedition. It was a fool’s errand, the Valkyrie long-since swallowed by hundreds of miles of impenetrable ice, as though it had never been at all. Short of melting the goddamn ice cap, it was lost. He was lost.

Peggy puts a hand on his arm, her wedding band cool and smooth on his skin. “I’ll drive you home. It’s been a long night.” 

He hates how gentle she is with him. Bucky pulls the ghost sheet over himself, fumbling for the proper alignment. He staggers to his feet and knows he’ll be in early tomorrow to refile everything strewn across the floor.

They ride through the base in her Jeep, to the townhome with its trim front lawn the neighbor mows and the crisp American flag SHIELD requires ranking officials to post at their front doors. Bucky plucks at his sheet, and Peggy looks, well, sad. Pained. Tired. And weren’t they both.

She cuts the engine and the neighborhood is still and quiet, save for crickets. The wind makes an eddie of fallen leaves scratch across the road. A jack-o-lantern flickers on the neighbor’s patio, candle sputtering. He lets her draw his costume away, like she always peels away his layers, and she studies him in the dark. She’s very close, and her breath lingers with mint and vodka.

“Pull yourself together,” she says. It’s more a command than a plea. “There’s a mission soon, a big one.”

The harshness of sobriety firmly reestablishes itself. Hoover’s bugged the house, but the Jeep is still safe. 

“Hydra?”

She nods once. 

His phantom arm twinges under the pinned uniform sleeve. A mission means plans to draw and execute, a chessboard to set and conquer. It’s the in-between weeks that sink him inside his own head, the worst place to be. 

“I need to know I can still trust you with this position,” she says again, and maybe she means department head of SHIELD’s vaunted covert ops unit, or maybe she means husband, and what attends the mutually beneficial arrangement. Grief does funny things to people, as if they could chase what they lost with the next closest substitute, sometimes finding it in the dark, in silence, when the blinds are drawn. A precious pretending, just to keep going. 

It’s his turn to nod. In the new seriousness of a mission, the events of earlier seem silly, indulgent. The scars that have mended him back together are tough. They survived, they carry on the fight, they protect each other. There is no place in war for fragility. He recognizes the hard lines in her face, the cold ruthlessness that means Hydra’s in play, and he’ll take bullets for her. 

“I won’t let you down,” he swears. And he hasn’t, not yet, not ever.

***

_3._

“Trick or treat!”

A clown, a cowboy, and what’s either a pirate or a child with eye damage. 

“Happy Halloween,” Bucky says and holds out one of the homemade cookie plates Dot prepared. Nowadays she spends the weekends in Jersey and he can’t blame her. “C’mon, just one. Bobby, take another for your sister will ya?”

The brownstone’s door opens and closes behind him, and he accepts the root beer Steve’s retrieved. They settle in the beach chairs Bucky’s set on the porch. The twilight deepens into real night hours, and he waves a moth away from the cookie platter. The root beer is cooler than the evening air and it leaves a crescent of moisture on his tee-shirt. 

“This is nice,” Steve says, gesturing vaguely. 

“Park Slope? Sure, it’s alright.” Hardly where he’d expected to settle. More and more he finds himself getting lost over his morning coffee, after he’s given Joe a quarter for the store, wondering exactly what the hell had happened, like the last fifteen years were a fever dream. He still looks too young to have a midlife crisis. So does Steve.

“No, I mean, you know. Catching up. Bringing the kids around. You don’t think they’ll get lost?”

Bucky snorts. “Not with Joe, kid’s got the neighborhood mapped like the back of his hand.” 

“Gets it from you,” Steve says, and there’s a pleased glow in part of Bucky’s chest. “Sorry I missed Dot. I know it’s been… a while.”

“A while?” That’s rich, and he doesn’t hide his resentment. “It’s been six years, Steve. Last I saw Mary, Peggy was holding her in the crook of her arm.”

“I know.” Steve sounds pained. “You get the letters, right? It’s this DC stuff, SHIELD, the Koreans, now Viet—”

“Yeah, we get ‘em.” He doesn’t say he keeps them carefully locked in his desk, postcards and family news with irrepressible sketches in the margins or even a whole page. “I get it. I’m up to my neck in Russian these days.”

“Trick or treat!”

A welcome interruption.

It’s a steady stream of neighborhood kids for the next half hour, and he goes through the cookie plates until finally he has to turn off the light. It’s past eight, and he gave Joe another hour to have Steve’s girls safely home. Someone down the block has the windows open and Miles Davis doodles above the sounds of traffic and neighbors setting out their trash. They have the porch to themselves, a single jack-o-lantern for company. The full moon hides shyly behind wisped clouds. 

Bucky sits and sips a second root beer, waiting for Steve to break the silence because it’s impossible to preserve it. And right on cue:

“You ever wonder if this is all real? You know, that we made it out?”

Bucky huffs; it’s too close for comfort. “Tell me you ain’t been doing those LSD studies.”

Steve chuckles quietly and lets the silence relapse. It’s Bucky who breaks it next.

“Yeah, I’ll have these dreams, some nights.” He taps his leg, licks his lips, and he’s never said this, never in fifteen years, but he doesn’t know when the next opening will come. “Where I fall off that train in the Alps, right? Or we’re in the Valkyrie and it crashes before we jump. Or we freeze to death out there, in the middle of fucking nowhere. And it seems real.”

He rubs his left arm to verify it’s there. The frostbite had been so severe, they said he would’ve lost it if not for the serum. In his nightmares sometimes he does. He shivers.

“Do you ever—” Steve stops. 

Bucky completes the sentence in various ways. Does he ever dream about how they huddled beneath their parachutes for days in the Arctic tundra, praying for rescue, desperate for warmth, delirious from hunger. Does he ever remember their reckless fucking, giving in finally, _finally_. What Steve looks like when he’s intent and intimate. Eyes blue like the massive sky, losing himself under both. Snow in his mouth. Does he ever chase the feeling, and turn the shower to ice cold, and fuck himself onto a finger or two while Dot’s in the next room. 

His watch says it’s a quarter till nine.

“Yeah. All the time.” He tells the truth.

Steve’s quiet again. Then:

“I know, six years, and it’s, it’s pretty stupid, huh.”

“What, you want me to pack and move to DC? You’re the one who left Brooklyn.”

There were reasons. Good ones. Unchangeable ones. He’s surprised when Steve’s hand finds his knee, hidden in the darkness, and its warm strength seeps through his slacks. 

“I miss you.”

They don’t look at each other, now, and Bucky covers Steve’s hand with his own, feels the knobs of his knuckles. His thumb caresses under the wrist to the vulnerable soft skin over veins, arteries, pulse, and his throat tightens. 

He doesn’t say they’re sending him to Laos next month. And he certainly doesn’t say he requested the deployment before he irreversibly fucks something up here for Dot, for Steve. For Joe. Eisenhower had pinned the Medal of Honor on him in the East Room of the White House and all Bucky had seen was Joe in his small yet serious suit, bowtie askew and brown locks carefully combed, his whole life ahead of him. 

Bucky spots a fireman’s helmet five houses down, trailed by two smaller figures in paper masks. 

“Come around for New Year’s?” he says. By the time Steve figures out he’s been assigned, and where, he’ll be deep in the jungle, off the grid. _Don’t come after me, not again._

“Yeah,” Steve smiles, and it doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s sensed the false pretense but doesn’t understand the what or why. “Yeah, we can do that.”

Now the kids are within earshot, and Bucky rises, Steve’s hand casually falling away with a piece of his heart.

He sorts through their pillowcase candy hauls, checks for pins and razors because he’s heard enough old wives’ tales at the deli this week, and packages leftover pumpkin pie for Lisa and Mary on their drive home. The sisters are the spitting image of Peggy and they both have Steve’s nose. Joe gives Lisa an extra candy apple, and christ if he won’t turn out to be the neighborhood charmer in a few more years. 

They toss their carefully-crafted paper masks away without a second thought.

***

_4._

The ripe pumpkin smells like dirt and autumn and promises of pie. 

“They say if you light a jack o’ lantern, it scares away bad spirits.”

“Strange selling you his spiel now?” Bucky stops as soon as he says it, and frowns. 

Steve notices and pulls away from where he’s set his lips against the nape of Bucky’s neck. “What is it?”

Bucky shakes his head and the moment is gone. “Déjà vu.” 

He’s unsettled. A lifetime of mucking around in his brain means every innocuous glitch could be a trigger waiting to happen. His thumb rubs the band on his right ring finger in what’s quickly become a reassuring habit. Steve hums and the rumble echoes in his ribs. Back to the pumpkin at hand. His smaller knives are nimble for the detailed, creative work.

Completed, the jack o’ lantern is set on the study windowsill, a tiny electric tea candle inside.

The witching hour comes and goes.

Bucky pours a glass of tap water at the kitchen sink and ignores the uncomfortable itch of standing fully nude in an open space. It’s his space; it’s safe. The hallway floorboard creaks and Steve appears in the dark, pale and rumple-haired from the bedroom, drawn like a magnet to his absence. The moonlight catches his hair and briefly dusts it silver, a gentle foreshadow that strikes Bucky in his chest. 

“Did you stay a little, when you saw her?” Bucky asks, setting the glass down. Steve is still warm from the sheets. They’ve talked about it, but not this part.

“It was hard not to,” he admits softly, candidly, and his eyes are luminous, taking Bucky in. 

“I’ll have these dreams, some nights. That you stay a long time.” Bucky trails his metal fingers over Steve’s nakedness, as if to confirm the soundness of his flesh and dispel a mirage. He looks the same as when he’d left the platform. The five seconds linger, though.

“What about tonight?” Steve murmurs, catching fingers between his lips, all soft play. The beard is beginning to regrow and it tickles the vibranium plates. His cock twitches. 

“I think tonight is this.” 

Bucky takes him back to bed, and then he takes him apart.

***

He tosses a nickel candy at Steve, who nabs it before it skitters down the fire escape. It’s a rare full-stomach afternoon and Mr. Murphy has the final World Series game on the radio out back of the shop. An autumn wind blows through the alley and he shields his cigarette. Winter and its parade of maladies are coming on early this year.

“Steve.”

No answer. He calls upstairs, where two spindly legs hang.

“Steve. Steven. Steven Grant Rogers.”

“I’m trying to catch the game, Buck!”

“Well I’m trying to say you better put a goddamn coat on before you catch flu out here.”

“I’m fine.”

He rolls his eyes. “I _know_. But you should—”

“Christ, you’re worse than ma!” 

“I’m looking out for you is all.” 

Stubborn silence. St. Louis scores another run and he stubs out his cigarette, watches the smoke whisk away on the breeze. Old Patty MacFee’s laundry flaps across the street, drawers and all, and her windowsill catches his eye. 

“Light a jack o’ lantern, scare away the bad spirits,” he says, half to himself.

“Buck, I swear—”

“Hey, I’ll quit yammering if you get your coat!”

The two legs kick back from sight and Bucky smiles even if Steve’ll give him shit for it later. He lays back on the landing, the fire escape creaking in rusted protest, and the sun-warmed metal slats soothe a tension in his shoulders. The baseball announcer’s voice rises and falls in a familiar lull, and he feels more than hears Steve return, a quiet solid presence beside him. His yesterday and tomorrow fall away and there is only this moment. He sinks into the sounds of the old neighborhood, the sunlight on his face.


End file.
